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The noon seems to be the ideal time to take an oral examination at the university-which may be due to the fact that students are usually not dawn.
University students are more likely to pass oral examinations if they are performed around noonaccording to a new study, which analyzed over 100,000 evaluations.
Carmelo Vicarioresearcher at the University of Messina, in Italy, decided to investigate whether there would be a correlation between the exam hours and their results after faced with a study that suggested that the ones Judges decisions are affected by Proximity of mealtime.
“I was trying to see if this It could be true in education“, Explains Vicario à.
With his colleagues, Vicario examined a public database to collect information about the results and schedules of More than 104,500 reviews Orals carried out by about 19,000 university students in Italy. The tests took place between October 2018 and February 2020 and were 1243 subjects.
The authors of the study found that, on average, approval rates were 54% at 8 am, rising to 72% at noon and then down to 51% at 16h00. “We found this beautiful data distribution bell -shaped“Says Vicario.
The results of the, published on Wednesday in Frontiers in Psychologythey were consistent in all types of oral evaluations such as language exams and research presentations. But Vicario recognizes that we do not know if this also applies to written tests.
“There are many external factors that affect performance students, ”says Thomas Lancasterresearcher at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study. “The time is one of them – Whether the time of day or even the intervals between exams. ”
Why is such a variationIt is difficult to unravel. May depend on Students’ chronotypes – The natural inclination of our body to sleep at a certain time, which determines whether we are a morning or night person.
The authors of the study suggest that the younger people are more likely to Being nocturnal and may prefer to sleep later. This may not coincide with the chronotypes of their older examiners, and so the closest point they align would be around noon.
At this time of day, There may be a balance between a student performs well and an examiner is generous with his scores.
“Like always, In the middle is the virtue“, Says Vicario, who expects the investigation to help universities plan the times of their oral exams.
